In January 2004 the Inland Revenue, now HMRC, entered into a strategic outsourcing contract, known as Aspire (Acquiring Strategic Partners for the Inland Revenue) with Capgemini. Aspire is responsible for providing IT Services for every HMRC department and is constantly exploring new ways of minimising costs while boosting productivity. Fujitsu is the Aspire infrastructure partner.

Aspire’s S4 is a standardised, shared service that delivers the full scope of data centre services. It enables the standardised, automated, efficient and cost-effective procurement of streamlined processes by using a shared virtualised technology infrastructure to host multiple applications on a common platform. This means that S4 breaks the model where separate lines of business own their infrastructure, invariably leading to poor infrastructure utilisation. In contrast, the S4 model means that each department has no need to care about which infrastructure hosts their services.

The SAFE business service, the accounting framework for HMRC went live to the S4 service on 4th January 2011. SAFE is a truly groundbreaking delivery as it was the first live service in Government to be deployed based on Aspire’s S4 service line using the Private Cloud technology.